


Gingerbread

by draculard



Category: Into the Woods (2014), Into the Woods - Sondheim/Lapine
Genre: Ambiguous Age, Dark Magic, F/F, Horror, Magical Corruption, Pseudo-Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-03-31
Packaged: 2019-12-30 01:56:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18305828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: "Won't you have one, Mother?" Rapunzel says.





	Gingerbread

When the Witch bakes gingerbread men, there’s something off about them.

They’ve unnerved Rapunzel for as long as she can remember. Their little eyes are full of life; their mouths are never smiling. They always seem to be set in a frown or a gasp or a scream.

It’s just frosting, she tells herself. Frosting and cinnamon and bits of hard candy swirling with strange, exotic colors. It makes her heart flutter every time the Witch perches on her window sill and pulls out a package wrapped in brown paper, and the smell of gingerbread fills the air.

It’s not altogether a good sort of flutter.

The Witch feeds her. She tells Rapunzel, “Open your mouth, darling,” and Rapunzel stares up at her with golden hair falling over her shoulders and pink lips parted, and the Witch puts the head of a gingerbread man there, so that it rests against her bottom lip and just barely touches her tongue.

Their eyes meet.

The Witch smiles -- a nervous, twitchy. She’s blushing a little, and Rapunzel is too young to know why and not yet wise enough to look away. She studies the Witch’s features with open curiosity and the Witch studies her right back before a strange look passes over her face and she suddenly looks away.

Rapunzel takes a bite of the gingerbread man, contemplating that strange look. The Witch’s gingerbread is soft and full of subtle flavor that explodes on her tongue, but sometimes that flavor isn’t entirely pleasant. Today it tastes of copper, the same taste Rapunzel knows from when she pricks her finger and sucks on the wound to heal it.

“Mother,” she says, “did you make these yourself?”

The Witch is not her mother.

“I did, darling,” she says. “Do you like them?”

Rapunzel’s tongue is coated in a taste too familiar to her. She tries to swallow it down but it won’t go. There’s something in the gingerbread man she can’t identify. Is it cloves? Or is it blood?

“I like them,” she says, but she isn’t quite sure.

“You like them,” the Witch breathes. Her voice is almost soundless. When she leans forward and puts her hand in Rapunzel’s hair, Rapunzel doesn’t pull away. She likes the feeling of fingernails against her scalp, the slight tug when the Witch brushes through her hair.

“You like them,” the Witch says again, and suddenly she’s alarmingly close. Her lips find Rapunzel’s, soft and warm. She doesn’t taste like gingerbread. She tastes bitter and Rapunzel tastes sweet. She tastes of acrid smoke and brewing potions and something acidic and green.

They share one flavor between them, though. Rapunzel kisses the Witch back, tainting her with the cinnamon-copper taste of gingerbread. The Witch’s fingers tangle in her hair, gripping it a little too hard. Rapunzel’s scalp burns, but she doesn’t pull away.

She kisses the Witch back. Is it possible to taste someone else’s pain? Is it possible to taste a scream? 

It’s the Witch who breaks them apart. She retreats to the other side of the tower, her cheeks flushed, her eyes downcast. She touches things without feeling them, running her hands down her heavy skirt, across the stone walls, over Rapunzel’s childhood toys. When she finally turns back toward Rapunzel, her eyes are on the window.

On escape.

“I’ll make sure to bring more next time,” the Witch says. Rapunzel waits for her to make eye contact, waits for her to acknowledge what happened, but she doesn’t. 

“I’d like that,” Rapunzel says, and she smiles to prove she isn’t lying, but the Witch still doesn’t look her way. Her blush deepens; so does her frown.

Silently, Rapunzel selects another gingerbread man. She bites its head off delicately. The taste appeals to her now, the sweetness brash against her tongue until the underlying bitterness takes over, flooding her mouth with the taste of blood. Little brown crumbs stick to her lips. 

She’s licking them away when the Witch meets her eyes at last.

“Won’t you have one, Mother?” Rapunzel says. 


End file.
